Total pages in book: 211
Estimated words: 201554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1008(@200wpm)___ 806(@250wpm)___ 672(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 201554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1008(@200wpm)___ 806(@250wpm)___ 672(@300wpm)
An idea stirs, and I snatch my purse and pull out the business card I’d grabbed from Eric’s desk. Confirming his cellphone and his email are on it, I pull up my own email and before I can talk myself out of it, I start to type:
Eric—
I grabbed your card from your desk. I wanted to call but it felt like you were pretty finished when you left. I wasn’t, but that just seems to be how things work with us.
I stop myself. What am I doing? This isn’t a personal email. I should delete that. I start again.
Eric—
I grabbed your card from your desk. I wanted to call, but I thought you might welcome an email more freely. I know that your history in Denver runs deep and dark. I shouldn’t have asked you to come back here in the first place, but I need someone to help me figure this out. I need to hire someone and Isaac has money and resources that I don’t. I need someone I can trust who can’t be bought off. So, this is me asking for help one last time. Who would you hire to investigate Kingston Motors? Just a referral would be appreciated and I don’t even have to mention your name.
Harper
I read the message and while there’s more, so much more, that I want to say, I think better. I hit send and hope for a reply. In the meantime, I start researching and looking for someone I can hire on my own. I create a list of operations outside of Denver who will be less influenced by Isaac and my stepfather, who may or may not be a part of what’s going on.
Hours later, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my mind racing. I grab my phone from the nightstand, pull up my email, disappointment stabbing at me with the discovery that there’s nothing from Eric. I’m such a fool. Obviously, I was nothing more than a conquest he needed to get out of his system. And he did. I should have known, and for reasons I can’t explain, it felt like something more happened between us, like there was a real connection, something lasting, but clearly, I was wrong. It’s time to move on. And yet, as I doze off, slipping into the haze of early slumber, I’m back in the past, living that moment by the pool when his eyes had found me, the tingling sensation running down my spine. The lift of my gaze and the force of that man’s attention. I’ve clearly never recovered.
My memory floats forward to me standing on that stage, scanning the crowd for Eric and catching a glimpse of him disappearing down the path. I wanted to shout for him to come back.
“Good riddance,” Isaac had murmured next to me. “I hope he’s leaving.”
And he had. He’d left. I’d felt that certainty like a sharp knife in my chest even before I knew. And yet still, the minute I was free of that stage, the minute the world of people I’d spoken in front of were focused solely on my stepfather, I’d hurried to confirm. I’d walked that path toward the cottage, my heart racing in my chest, and found the door unlocked. I’d also found the cottage empty. And I’d gone to bed that night, like I am this one, with the feel of his hands on my body, the scent of him in my nostrils. Those piercing eyes haunting me, and the two nicknames that define our separation in my mind: the princess and the bastard.
Eric
I’m sitting on the slate gray couch of my living room with a whiskey in my hand and my MacBook on the coffee table in front of me, that damn email from Harper open and staring back at me as it has for a good two hours. I down the amber liquid in my glass, a smooth thirty-year, and much needed when stomaching anything Kingston. I snatch up the Rubik’s cube sitting on the table beside me and start turning it, the numbers in my head telling stories that no one else would understand, and doing so every damn moment of my life. Right now, they’re telling the story of the bastard and the princess.
I set the damn cube down and stand up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling window to the left of the main living area. I stop in front of the glass and nothing but inky night touches my eyes, a storm on the horizon. Out there beyond that darkness is a spectacular Manhattan skyline to kill for that I worked my ass off to earn. That no one named Kingston gave me. They don’t get to give or take from me ever again. And they did take.
I press my hands to the glass, cold seeping through my palms and sliding up my arms, but there is fire in my blood, memories of the only person that could ever get me to give two fucks about anything Kingston in my mind: Harper.